The US film industry may have generated revenues somewhere in the region of $40 billion last year, but it seems Hollywood still has plenty of work to do if it wants to compete with that most hallowed of American institutions: the public library. From a report: According to a recent Gallup poll (the first such survey since 2001), visiting the local library remains by far the most common cultural activity Americans engage in. As reported earlier today by Justin McCarthy: "Visiting the library remains the most common cultural activity Americans engage in, by far. The average 10.5 trips to the library U.S. adults report taking in 2019 exceeds their participation in eight other common leisure activities. Americans attend live music or theatrical events and visit national or historic parks roughly four times a year on average and visit museums and gambling casinos 2.5 times annually. Trips to amusement or theme parks (1.5) and zoos (.9) are the least common activities among this list."

On Tuesday, Sonos announced that come May 2020, a number of its older products will no longer receive software updates. Naturally, this frustrated many longtime customers, prompting Sonos CEO Patrick Spence to issue a statement to try to clear up the confusion. The Verge reports: "We heard you," is how Spence begins the letter to customers. "We did not get this right from the start." Spence apologizes for any confusion and reiterates that the so-called legacy products will "continue to work as they do today." "Many of you have invested heavily in your Sonos systems, and we intend to honor that investment for as long as possible."

Similarly, Spence pledges that Sonos will deliver bug fixes and security patches to legacy products "for as long as possible" -- without any hard timeline. Most interesting, he says "if we run into something core to the experience that can't be addressed, we'll work to offer an alternative solution and let you know about any changes you'll see in your experience." The letter from Sonos' CEO doesn't retract anything that the company announced earlier this week; Spence is just trying to be as clear as possible about what's happening come May. Spence again confirms that Sonos is planning a way for customers to fork any legacy devices they might own off of their main Sonos system with more modern speakers. (Sonos architected its system so that all devices share the same software. Once one product is no longer eligible for updates, the whole setup stops receiving them. This workaround is designed to avoid that problem.)

Might it be possible that someday in the near future, an official might get you to dance around a bit, in order to confirm that you're really you? Perhaps not, but nonetheless, a recent study has determined that people's identities can be matched to their unique style of dancing. From a report: Scientists at Finland's University of Jyvaskyla started out by using motion capture technology to see if test subjects' psychological traits could be ascertained from the way in which they danced -- such traits included their mood, their level of empathy, and how extroverted or neurotic they were. The researchers were also interested in seeing if simply by watching a person dance, it would be possible to determine what sort of music they were dancing to. This only worked about 30 percent of the time. What they unintentionally discovered, however, was that regardless of the type of music, each person has a characteristic style of dancing that can be identified and matched specifically to themselves. Doing so is accomplished utilizing machine learning algorithms, in conjunction with the motion capture tech. In the study, a total of 73 volunteers each danced to eight genres of music â" these included Blues, Country, Dance/Electronica, Jazz, Metal, Pop, Reggae and Rap. The participants received no instructions, other than to "move any way that felt natural."

Bruce Schneier, writing at New York Times: Communities across the United States are starting to ban facial recognition technologies. In May of last year, San Francisco banned facial recognition; the neighboring city of Oakland soon followed, as did Somerville and Brookline in Massachusetts (a statewide ban may follow). In December, San Diego suspended a facial recognition program in advance of a new statewide law, which declared it illegal, coming into effect. Forty major music festivals pledged not to use the technology, and activists are calling for a nationwide ban. Many Democratic presidential candidates support at least a partial ban on the technology. These efforts are well intentioned, but facial recognition bans are the wrong way to fight against modern surveillance. Focusing on one particular identification method misconstrues the nature of the surveillance society we're in the process of building. Ubiquitous mass surveillance is increasingly the norm. In countries like China, a surveillance infrastructure is being built by the government for social control. In countries like the United States, it's being built by corporations in order to influence our buying behavior, and is incidentally used by the government.

In all cases, modern mass surveillance has three broad components: identification, correlation and discrimination. Let's take them in turn. Facial recognition is a technology that can be used to identify people without their knowledge or consent. It relies on the prevalence of cameras, which are becoming both more powerful and smaller, and machine learning technologies that can match the output of these cameras with images from a database of existing photos. But that's just one identification technology among many. People can be identified at a distance by their heart beat or by their gait, using a laser-based system. Cameras are so good that they can read fingerprints and iris patterns from meters away. And even without any of these technologies, we can always be identified because our smartphones broadcast unique numbers called MAC addresses. Other things identify us as well: our phone numbers, our credit card numbers, the license plates on our cars. China, for example, uses multiple identification technologies to support its surveillance state.

A new article in Rolling Stone argues that the forgotten 2013 hit song "Blurred Lines", which a court later ruled infringed on a 1977 song by Marvin Gaye, turned copyright law into "a minefield" -- for the music industry.
While copyright laws used to protect only lyrics and melodies (a prime example is the Chiffons' successful suit against George Harrison in 1976 for the strong compositional similarities between his "My Sweet Lord" and their "He's So Fine"), the "Blurred Lines" case raised the stakes by suggesting that the far more abstract qualities of rhythm, tempo, and even the general feel of a song are also eligible for protection -- and thus that a song can be sued for feeling like an earlier one. Sure enough, a jury in 2019 ruled that Katy Perry owed millions for ostensibly copying the beat of her hit "Dark Horse" from a little-known song by Christian rapper Flame, stunning both the music business and the legal community. "They're trying to own basic building blocks of music, the alphabet of music that should be available to everyone," Perry's lawyer Christine Lepera warned in the case's closing arguments.

That case, which Perry's team is currently in the process of appealing, suggests a second point: Plaintiffs in copycat cases are largely targeting megahit songs because they've seen where the money is, and the increasing frequency of those court battles in headlines is causing an avalanche effect of further infringement lawsuits.... While some record labels may have the budget to hire on-call musicologists who vet new releases for potential copyright claims, smaller players who can't afford that luxury are turning toward a tried-and-true form of protection: insurance. Lucas Keller -- the founder of music management company Milk and Honey, which represents writers and producers who've worked with everyone from Alessia Cara and Carrie Underwood to 5 Seconds of Summer and Muse -- recently began encouraging all his songwriter clients to purchase errors-and-omissions insurance, which protects creative professionals from legal challenges to their intellectual property. "We all feel like the system has failed us," Keller says. "There are a lot of aggressive lawyers filing lawsuits and going ham on people." (He's particularly critical of publishers whose rosters are heavier on older catalogs than new acts: "Heritage publishers who aren't making a lot of money are coming out of the woodwork and saying, âWe're going to take a piece of your contemporary hit....'â") Artists are understandably reluctant to publicly disclose that they have copyright insurance, which could open them up to an increase in lawsuits. But music attorney Bob Celestin, who's helped represent acts like Pusha T and Missy Elliott, says it is safe to assume that the majority of artists who show up in Top 10 chart positions are covered in this way...

The popularity of cheap music-production software, which offers the same features to every user, has added another layer of risk. "Music is now more similar than it is different, for the first time," says Ross Golan, a producer and songwriter who has released songs with stars like Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber. "People are using the same sample packs, the same plug-ins, because it's efficient."

Then there's the issue of the finite number of notes, chord progressions, and melodies available...

"Shares of Apple gained 86.2% in 2019, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence," reports the Motley Fool: The tech stock's share price tracked relatively closely with momentum for the broader market for much of the year and then dramatically outperformed from September through December thanks to strong performance for its wearables products.

iPhone Sales were down from 2018, but they still came in ahead of expectations, and the company's business was lifted by strong performance for its wearables segment... Growth for Apple's services segment (which includes revenue generated from the company's mobile app store and subscription-based offerings like Apple Music) also slowed in the year. However, explosive growth for AirPods, promising momentum for the Apple Watch, and the promise of a bigger tech and feature leap for the iPhone line in 2020 powered a great year for Apple stock. Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research, estimates that AirPod sales came in at roughly $6 billion in 2019 and nearly doubled compared to 2018.

The Bernstein analyst projects that AirPod revenue will hit $15 billion in 2020.

In 2019, companies lost about $9.1 billion to password piracy and sharing. From a report: On Dec. 9, Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge took aim at the "content companies" entering the direct-to-consumer streaming business. The cable executive told a roomful of investment bankers in Manhattan that these new streamers are "creating havoc in the ecosystem." Rutledge wasn't talking about the proliferation of content or the fight to secure exclusive deals with talent. He was targeting the lax security and rampant password sharing that's prevalent across the streaming landscape. "Half the people in the country live in houses with two or less people in them, and yet these services have five streams," Rutledge added. "There are more streams available than there are homes to use them." Password sharing has serious economic consequences. In 2019, companies lost about $9.1 billion to password piracy and sharing, and that will rise to $12.5 billion in 2024, according to data released by research firm Parks Associates.

For now, many streamers -- including Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and Amazon Prime -- seem content to allow the practice to continue, even while they crack down on illicit password sales. But as services mature, priorities will likely change. "When the growth starts to flatten and you start to look at the balance sheet, you are going to be looking for revenue," says Jean-Marc Racine, chief product officer of video delivery and security firm Synamedia. The company (which counts Disney, Comcast and AT&T among its clients) conducted a study of two anonymous video providers and said Jan. 6 that it found they were losing more than $70 million annually from password sharing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Now that most smartphones don't have headphone jacks, there's no shortage of complaints about Bluetooth. This year at CES, the industry group in charge of defining the standard, the Bluetooth SIG, is introducing new features that should address some of them. Later this year, it will finalize new support for Bluetooth LE Audio, which is an umbrella term for a bunch of new features for Bluetooth devices. The new features include higher-quality audio, hearing aid support, broadcasting to many people, and working better with wireless earbuds. Unfortunately, as is the way with all industry specs, it will take some time for these features to make their way into consumer products. The old joke that "Bluetooth will be better next year" still holds true.

The feature that will likely affect the most people is the new "Low Complexity Communication Codec," or LC3. LC3 simultaneously reduces power consumption while increasing audio quality. Right now, the lowest common denominator for Bluetooth audio is the relatively old and relatively bad SBC codec, though many phones support Qualcomm's proprietary codec, AptX. In order to get SBC to sound good, you have to increase the bitrate, which increases power consumption. The Bluetooth SIG claims that, in its testing, users preferred the new LC3 codec, even at significantly lower bitrates. The group is also finally beefing up official support for Bluetooth hearing aids. It has worked in conjunction with a European hearing instrument association to ensure broad support in the coming years, including working with TVs and other devices. A new "broadcast" feature will theoretically allow an entire movie theater audience to use their Bluetooth headphones to tune in to the movie, although how exactly the pairing process would work is "TBD," the report says.

Bluetooth LE will natively support multistream audio, which "means wireless earbuds will be able to receive their own independent signal from a phone instead of having to communicate with each other," the report adds. "Multistream also will allow for easier sharing of Bluetooth audio among multiple users from the same source."

Apple on Wednesday said that its services business, which includes software for things like news, gaming, apps, music and video, had its best ever year in 2019. From a report: "2019 was the biggest year for Services in Apple's history. We introduced several exciting new experiences for our customers, all while setting the standard for user privacy and security," said Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet Software and Services in a statement. In an effort to showcase its growth to investors, Apple released a slew of engagement numbers for several of its services products. It says: Apple News has over 100 million monthly active users in the U.S., U.K., Australia and Canada. Apple Music now offers over 60 million songs in 115 countries. Apple Podcasts offers over 800,000 shows in 155 countries. Apple Card and Apple Pay are accepted in more than 150 stadiums, ballparks, arenas and entertainment venues.

One day after Amazon announced that it has populated the world with over 100 million Alexa-powered devices, Google decided to take the opportunity to tout some of its numbers. At CES 2020 on Tuesday, the company said that the Google Assistant is now used by 500 million monthly active users. VentureBeat reports of the new features coming to the digital assistant in 2020: Later this year, saying "Hey Google, read it" or "Hey Google, read this page" will trigger the assistant to read or translate text from an article or webpage into 42 languages. Longform reading will begin with articles and websites but may expand to areas like reading your emails in the future, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat.

Starting with Hisense and TCL televisions, Google Assistant is also coming to turned-off TVs, showcasing a range of new features today like a redesigned speed dial, sticky notes for smart displays, and new privacy-focused voice command. Google wants more TV manufacturers to install microphones for far-field voice recognition in order to make TV's speakers function the same way a smart speaker works today, responding to voice commands to play music, check the weather, or ask a question. Google Nest smart displays today often share visual content in response to questions, but Google Assistant on televisions will act the same as a smart speaker, and only turn on the television if you say you want to watch a TV show or video content, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat. Other features coming to the Google Assistant include: Scheduled Actions, where you can ask the Assistant to turn on/off or start/stop a smart device at the time of your choosing; More privacy-focused voice controls like "Hey Google, that wasn't for you" to delete a mistaken recording; and the ability to say "Hey Google, leave a note" to place a Sticky Note on a Google Nest smart display for house guests or your family to see.

Audio company Sonos has sued Google for allegedly copying its patented speaker technology while undercutting it at market. From a report: The New York Times reports that it filed two lawsuits covering five patents on its wireless speaker design. Sonos is also asking for a sales ban on Google's laptops, phones, and speakers in the US through a separate case with the International Trade Commission. Sonos claims that Google stole its multiroom speaker technology after getting access to it through a 2013 partnership. The original partnership would let Sonos speakers support Google Play Music, but the company allegedly used patented technology in its now-discontinued Chromecast Audio device, then continued to use it in the Google Home lineup of smart speakers and the Pixel product lineup. Meanwhile, Sonos says Google subsidized its own products to sell them at a cheaper price while using them to extract more data from buyers.

Bluetooth will soon roll out some of its technology's biggest improvements in its nearly 20-year history. From a report: The new Bluetooth standard will be known as LE Audio and one of the biggest improvements it will include will be a feature called Multi-Stream Audio. Bluetooth is currently limited to streaming audio to just a single device. That's fine for portable speakers and headphones where both sides are connected with a wire, but for wireless earbuds, such as Apple's AirPods, your smartphone can actually only connect to one side. That earbud then has to forward the audio stream onto the one in your other ear, which requires some clever software tricks to ensure everything remains in sync. Multi-Stream Audio will solve that, as it will allow a single device, such as a smartphone, to stream flawlessly synced audio to multiple audio devices at the same time.

The most obvious benefit is that it will be much easier to make wireless earbuds work more reliably, without any audio lag issues. But the feature promises to also benefit those who want to use their wireless headphones with multiple devices at the same time, such as a tablet, phone, and a laptop, streamlining the process of switching between each audio source without having to go through an annoying disconnect/reconnect process each time. Bluetooth LE Audio will also make sharing a music stream with others possible. Users should be able to easily share audio from their smartphone with friends, as multiple sets of wireless headphones can be connected to a single source device at once, and each should receive the exact same audio stream in perfect sync with all the others. Further expanding on that idea is another new feature known as Broadcast Audio which allows a single audio source device to broadcast several audio streams to an unlimited number of wireless headphones, without any private pairing required.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On the heels of the killing of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani by a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper strike on January 2, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned of potential cyberattacks against critical infrastructure by Iran. That warning probably didn't apply to the website of the Federal Deposit Library Program, operated by the U.S. Government Printing Office -- which was defaced on January 4 with a pro-Iranian message and an image of a bloodied President Donald Trump being punched by an Iranian fist.

The FDLP website is no stranger to defacement attacks. As a brief analysis of the attack by a security researcher with the Twitter username @sshell_ noted, the site has been defaced twice in the last 10 years -- most recently in 2014, when it was replaced with an electronic dance music video featuring a dancing cat. Based on a fingerprint of the site's files, the site -- based on the Joomla content management system -- had not had its code updated since 2012. And the site had modules that used a version of Joomla's RSForm that had been flagged 11 months ago as being vulnerable to a SQL Injection attack. While the image depicting Trump had no metadata attached to it, another image with text had Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) data indicating it had been created with Adobe Photoshop CS 6 for Windows in 2015. As sshell_ noted, the image was used in a defacement reported to the "cybercrime archive" Zone-H by a user identifying themselves as IRAN-CYBER on December 2, 2015. A DHS spokesperson for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said that "there is no confirmation that this was the action of Iranian state-sponsored actors."

26-year-old Sean Samitt faked his own stabbing, and is now facing a felony charge and up to four years in prison, according to a Michigan police department -- which says it solved the case with help from his own Apple Watch. Samit reported he was attacked and stabbed in the abdomen by an unknown man in the parking lot at the Temple Kol Ami, where he worked as a cantorial soloist, which is a music director. He reported the crime on December 15, telling police that he was confronted about 7 p.m. as he was leaving work by a white male in his late 30s to early 40s... Police said officers searched the parking lot for a weapon, blood or any other piece of evidence but came back negative. K-9 officers were not able to locate a scent on the suspect. While searching Temple Kol Ami, detectives found bloody tissues in Samitt's office and the men's bathroom. They also located a knife in the kitchen area with blood on the tip of the blade.

Suspecting Samitt's wounds were self-inflicted, officers obtained surveillance footage from a house across the street and confirmed that no assault took place. Police said Samitt admitted to making up the attack and said he lost consciousness and accidentally stabbed himself while he was washing dishes at the synagogue. He said he lied about the incident because he was being harassed at work about his medical condition.

The second story also turned out to be fabricated, police said. Officers were able to obtain information from Samitt's cellphone health application that was synced to his Apple Watch, confirming he did not lose consciousness. Samitt then admitted to intentionally stabbing himself.
"We are very disturbed to hear of incidents like these. Not only is it a crime to file a false police report, but those who commit such acts take vital resources away from the folks who need help from law enforcement," said Carolyn Normandin, Regional Director of Anti Defamation League Michigan.

Music is an ideal medium for interstellar communication. From a report: Each summer for the past 25 years, tens of thousands of people have flocked to Barcelona, Spain, to witness Sonar, a three-day festival dedicated to electronic music, art, and design. To celebrate Sonar's 25th anniversary in 2018, the festival partnered with the Catalonia Institute for Space Studies and the nonprofit METI International to send a series of interstellar messages to Luyten's star, a red dwarf about 12 light-years from Earth. Although red dwarfs are the most common stellar objects in our galaxy, Luyten's star is remarkable for hosting GJ237b, the closest potentially habitable planet outside of our own solar system. No one knows for sure whether GJ237b hosts life, intelligent or otherwise, but if ET does call the planet home, Sonar wants to rock its socks off. Over the course of several nights in late 2017 and early 2018, a radar system in Tromso, Norway, blasted a custom message from Sonar toward GJ237b. Like any good correspondence, the message began with a greeting: In this case, the first 33 prime numbers repeated on two alternating radio frequencies functioned as a stand-in for "hello."

This was followed by a brief tutorial that the message designers hoped would teach ET to extract the music written by Sonar-affiliated musicians and embedded in the message. [...] The Sonar messages are unique insofar as they are the only interstellar transmissions to use songs designed by musicians specifically for communicating with ET. That the messages include a substantial information content places them firmly in the tradition of messaging extraterrestrial intelligences, or METI, a term coined by the Russian radio astronomer Alexander Zaitsev to differentiate the practice from other modes of interstellar communication. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, is focused on listening for ET signals rather than sending them, and "active SETI" is about creating beacons that lack information but signal to alien intelligences that we exist.

An anonymous reader quotes USA Today: Spotify announced Friday that it will suspend political advertising on its platform next year, making it the latest in a series of tech and social media platforms to publicly address how it will handle content targeting voters. The music streaming company said that its decision was made because it does not yet have the means to screen political advertising content.

"At this point in time, we do not yet have the necessary level of robustness in our processes, systems and tools to responsibly validate and review this content. We will reassess this decision as we continue to evolve our capabilities," a spokesperson said in a statement to media outlets.

The move by Spotify, which was first reported by AdAge, comes after a wave of backlash against Facebook, which said it would not fact check content in political ads... Twitter also committed to stop accepting political ads in a stance against "forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people." And Google has said it will restrict the way political advertisers can target specific audiences.

dryriver writes: The 2010s were not necessarily the greatest decade to live through. AAA computer games were not only DRM'd and internet tethered to death but became increasingly formulaic and pay-to-win driven, and poor quality console ports pissed off PC gamers. Forced software subscriptions for major software products you could previously buy became a thing. Personal privacy went out the window in ways too numerous to list, with lawmakers failing on many levels to regulate the tech, data-mining and internet advertising companies in any meaningful way. Severe security vulnerabilities were found in hundreds of different tech products, from Intel CPUs to baby monitors and internet-connected doorbells. Thousands of tech products shipped with microphones, cameras, and internet connectivity integration that couldn't be switched off with an actual hardware switch. Many electronics products became harder or impossible to repair yourself. Printed manuals coming with tech products became almost non-existent. Hackers, scammers, ransomwarers and identity thieves caused more mayhem than ever before. Troll farms, click farms and fake news factories damaged the integrity of the internet as an information source. Tech companies and media companies became afraid of pissing off the Chinese government.

Windows turned into a big piece of spyware. Intel couldn't be bothered to innovate until AMD Ryzen came along. Nvidia somehow took a full decade to make really basic realtime raytracing happen, even though smaller GPU maker Imagination had done it years earlier with a fraction of the budget, and in a mobile GPU to boot. Top-of-the-line smartphones became seriously expensive. Censorship and shadow banning on the once-more-open internet became a thing. Easily-triggered people trying to muzzle other people on social media became a thing. The quality of popular music and music videos went steadily downhill. Star Wars went to shit after Disney bought it, as did the Star Trek films. And mainstream cinema turned into an endless VFX-heavy comic book movies, remakes/reboots and horror movies fest. In many ways, television was the biggest winner of the 2010s, with many new TV shows with film-like production values being made. The second winner may be computer hardware that delivered more storage/memory/performance per dollar than ever before.

To the question: What, dear Slashdotters, will the 2020s bring us? Will things get better in tech and other things relevant to nerds, or will they get worse?

Pocket Casts, one of the most widely used podcast apps, has shared a list of podcasts that were most subscribed by its user base this year. Top 10 podcasts this year were: 1. The Joe Rogan Experience.
2. This American Life.
3. Stuff You Should Know.
4. Serial.
5. The Daily.
6. Reply All.
7. Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast.
8. Dan Carlin's Hardcore History.
9. Radiolab.
10. Invisible. Did your favorite podcast make it to the list? If not, what are some of the podcasts you listen to that you enjoy?

Kyle Wiggers, writing for VentureBeat: AI and machine learning algorithms are quite skilled at generating works of art -- and highly realistic images of apartments, people, and pets to boot. But relatively few have been tuned to singing synthesis, or the task of cloning musicians' voices. Researchers from Amazon and Cambridge put their collective minds to the challenge in a recent paper in which they propose an AI system that requires "considerably" less modeling than previous work of features like vibratos and note durations. It taps a Google-designed algorithm -- WaveNet -- to synthesize the mel-spectrograms, or representations of the power spectrum of sounds, which another model produces using a combination of speech and signing data.

The system comprises three parts, the first of which is a frontend that takes a musical score as input and produces note embeddings (i.e., numerical representations of notes) to be sent to an encoder. The second is a model that is modified to accept the aforementioned embeddings, whose decoder produces mel-specrograms. As for the third and final component -- the WaveNet vocoder, which mimics things like stress and intonation in speech -- it synthesizes the spectrograms into song. The frontend performs linguistic analysis on the score lyrics, allowing for three possible vowel levels of stress and ignoring punctuation. In time, it discovers which phonemes (perceptually distinct units of sound) correspond to each note of the score using syllabification information specified in the score itself. It also computes the expected duration in seconds of each note, as well as the tempo and time signature of the score, which it combines into embeddings.

Over the past few years, record labels have been suing ISPs for not removing music pirates from their services, and this week, the record labels may have hit a tremendous victory. From a report: A US District Court jury has found Cox Communications liable for piracy infringement of more than 10,000 musical works, and as a result, has awarded $1 billion in damages to Sony Music, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and EMI. Essentially, the recording industry just showed that a jury will buy its argument that an ISP should be held liable for failing to kick a music pirate off its network. And similar lawsuits like the one Cox lost today have been filed against Charter, Charter subsidiary Bright House Networks, RCN, and Grande Communications, so there's a chance that rulings against those companies could go similarly.